You’ll hear a little about Schein’s early career at Harvard and MIT, including his Ph.D. work – a paper on the experience of POWs during wartime contrasted against the indoctrination of individuals joining an organization for employment. Some of Schein’s 30-year-old concepts that are now common practice and theory in organizations, such as “psychological safety”

Discussion Points:

• A brief overview of Schein’s career, at Harvard and MIT’s School of Management and his fascinating Ph.D. on POWs during the Korean War
• A bit about the book, Humble Inquiry
• Digging into the paper
• Three types of learning:
• Knowledge acquisition and insight learning
• Habits and skills
• Emotional conditioning and learned anxiety
• Practical examples and the metaphor of Pavlov’s dog
• Countering Anxiety I with Anxiety II
• Three processes of ‘unfreezing’ an organization or individual to change:
• Disconfirmation
• Creation of guilt or anxiety
• Psychological safety
• Mistakes in organizations and how they respond
• There are so many useful nuggets in this paper
• Schein’s solutions: Steering committees/change teams/groups to lead the organizations and manage each other’s anxiety
• Takeaways:
• How an organization deals with mistakes will determine how change happens
• Assessing levels of fear and anxiety
• Know what stands in your way if you want progress
• Answering our episode question: How can organizations learn faster? 1) Don't make people afraid to enter the green room. 2) Or make them more afraid to stand on the black platform.

Quotes:

“...a lot of people credit [Schein] with being the granddaddy of organizational culture.” - Drew

“[Schein] says .. in order to learn skills, you've got to be willing to be temporarily incompetent, which is great if you're learning soccer and not so good if you're learning to run a nuclear power plant.” - Drew

“Schein says quite clearly that punishment is very effective in eliminating certain kinds of behavior, but it's also very effective in inducing anxiety when in the presence of the person or the environment that taught you that lesson.” - Drew

“We've said before that we think sometimes in safety, we're about three or four decades behind some of the other fields, and this might be another example of that.” - David

“Though curiosity and innovation are values that are praised in our society, within organizations and particularly large organizations, they're not actually rewarded.” - Drew

Resources:

Link to the paper

Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

Feedback@safetyofwork